Heat Rising In Politicians' Kitchens

To Wit

August 19, 2007|By COLIN McENROE

Before I write another word, let me say that yesterday, some people showed up here at my apartment in Hartford and installed a brand new dishwasher.

But I rent this place. My landlady put the dishwasher in, because the old one had stopped accepting water of any kind, so that the dishes were always kind of dry-roasted, as opposed to washed. (I caught on to this because my glasses would emerge with little bits of citrus pulp and other stuff kind of baked onto the sides of them, as opposed to rinsed away.)

I have no idea where she bought the new one or how much she paid. In fact, it was already installed in my kitchen when I came home last night. I haven't even washed any dishes in it yet. It is my firm belief that I have come by this dishwasher honestly, and if I decide to run for mayor of Hartford, I want the facts about this dishwasher -- which isn't even really mine -- to be out there for the voters.

You probably know the old saw in politics: ``The only way [This or That Bloated Incumbent] is ever going to lose an election is if he's caught in bed with a dead woman or a live boy.''

I'm not even sure that old saw is true anymore. In 2006, Joe Lieberman probably could have spent $4 million on a series of commercials touting his ability to revive dead women with the healing power of his naked body -- a power that comes only through decades of experience as a public servant -- and won the election anyway.

But the old saw should, at minimum, be amended to include something about kitchen center islands. The old saw should include something about anybody sawing, for any reason, at one's house.

The modern-day Teapot Dome scandals may actually involve teapots, and the first thing that any leader's Kitchen Cabinet should tell him is to pay for his own kitchen cabinets. Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez is the latest public official to fall under scrutiny for a fishy-looking kitchen-bathroom renovation deal with a city contractor.

If John Rowland had taken a different approach to home improvements, he probably wouldn't be a tambourine-banging Christian inspirational ex-convict lecturer today. (The hastily written, last-minute checks that Patricia Rowland wrote to those contractors eventually became available to the press as part of some massive document dump, and I noted at the time that they were -- with some aptness -- Looney Tunes-theme checks with little pictures of Bugs Bunny hitting Elmer Fudd's head off a golf tee.)

Former Bridgeport Mayor Joseph P. Ganim also accepted home improvements (and virtually every other material item that can be composed from known molecules) from city contractors, which is why he is serving 213 years in a Siberian krypton mine for basically the same thing Rowland served about 10 months for and why Bridgeport was forced to replace Ganim with a new mayor who merely snorts discount cocaine.

In Alaska, U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, who has served in Congress ever since his stunning defeat of William Seward in 1868, is also under investigation for possibly illegal renovations on his home, a grotesque, hulking A-frame which was apparently jacked up so that an entire story could be added to it, and much of the labor was performed by enslaved Arctic sloths and moose.

And former U.S. Rep. Randall ``Duke'' Cunningham, R-Prison, not content to take bribes in the form of renovations, actually had outside sources paying for his mortgages on lavish properties.

We don't know all the details on the Perez mess yet, but all of these scandals have a bittersweet symmetry with the state of American financial markets, which have taken on the appearance of John Ashcroft after a long visit with Alberto Gonzales in a candy-striper outfit. Why is your 401(k) sucking saline right now? Because of a virus it caught from the mortgage lending world, which decided a few years ago it was a good idea to start issuing $400,000 mortgages to Nukak Maku nomadic Amazonian tribesmen whose previous work experience included hunting monkeys with blow guns.

The country has been swept up into crib-mania, so much so that there are actually two different TV shows named, respectively, ``Flip This House'' (A&E) and ``Flip That House'' (Discovery Home). Neither one of them involves noted TV anchor Dennis House, who, like me, actually lives in Hartford, along with his wife, noted TV anchor Kara Sundlun, and their noted baby, Ivy Earl Sundlun-House, who hosts a show on TLC called ``Flip My Parents.''

I mention this because so few full-time journalists actually live in Hartford anymore. In fact, I'm hard-pressed to think of any others, except ``alternative'' journalists who can be arrested for no reason under an obscure provision in the city charter. It's just kind of interesting -- given the breathless coverage that all major media outlets will now give the mayoral race and Perez's problems -- that nobody wants to live in this city where it's so damn important who the mayor is.